It was on a 1984 boat trip around Anguilla, then a scrub-covered bump of an island that had only recently gained paved roads, that Linda and Charles Hickox spotted their future: an empty, white, mile-long cove. Soon enough, the couple returned to Maundays Bay with Californian architect Oscar Farmer, known for his work on Bing Crosby’s Palm Desert estate, to build the restaurant Pimms. It became an instant draw for their jet-setting friends who would zip 25 minutes from St Martin for dinner. The Hickoxes set lanterns along the sand and told everyone of their dream to build, as Linda often repeated, ‘the best hotel on the best beach in the Caribbean’.

This article was first published in the March 2019 issue of Traveller magazine

And it was. Cap Juluca opened in 1988, quickly becoming the most coveted place to stay in the West Indies – Leeward, Windward, or otherward. While St Martin’s golden bays had begun to feel crowded and hilly St Barth’s, 50 minutes by boat, saw the long hand of private wealth snatching up its properties, the opening of Cap Juluca offered Anguilla – Spanish for ‘eel’, owing to its sinuous length – a kind of glamour unprecedented for its time. Its white-washed domed villas, a few with their own plunge pools, conjured Talitha Getty in Tangier. The beach was where major deals were struck, and from where you could walk barefoot to any of the hotel’s three restaurants – none of which were particularly good, but the food wasn’t the point. Actors including Denzel Washington and Liam Neeson came here to hide in plain sight, and countless guests returned year after year.

They came to see Terrance ‘Casa’ Rogers, who ran the beach cabana between villas three and five, so swift at recalling your favourite gin or the preferred angle of your umbrella that guests fought each other to buy him lunch – or George I-Davis, who once helped a pregnant guest who couldn’t get comfortable on her sunbed by digging her a trench in the sand to rest in. The children swam and snorkelled and eventually returned with their own children. Even after the hotel was hit by years of legal turmoil in the 2000s, dragging it into disrepair, the guests kept coming back: for the beach that ruins you for all other beaches; for ‘their’ villas, the doors of which they never once locked. No one wanted to let go.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to – for long. Belmond, known for its brilliant restorations of historic establishments, from the Hotel Cipriani in Venice to Rio’s Copacabana Palace, acquired Cap Juluca from its embattled owners and closed it on 28 August 2017. One week later, Hurricane Irma rolled through, ripping roofs off houses, reducing churches to rubble and beheading palm trees. (Though Anguilla, where concrete buildings are the norm, fared better than St Martin, home to Belmond’s sister property La Samanna.)

With everything but the walls damaged, the £95 million budget was put to good use. Texas-based Rottet Studio (The Surrey, the Beverly Hills Hotel) deftly recaptured what was so stylish about the hotel in the 1980s while also softening things up. Gone are the chrome finishes, dark furniture and The Arabian Nights lanterns, replaced with woven-grass rugs, cane and palm rattan and limestone tabletops. In the lobby, the rounded ceiling hovers over a creamy sofa and castaway chairs. In what might be a nod to this surrealist tableau, framed as it is by the Greco-Moorish archways that reflect the afternoon light, public spaces are filled with tall urns and stone spheres that could have been plucked straight out of a de Chirico.

More sleight of hand: Belmond has seamlessly slipped in five new villas to make a total of 24. (One former villa is now a spa with herbal treatments inspired by rituals of the island’s native Arawaks.) Rooms are relaxed: four-poster beds, seagrass armoires, twisted-abaca chairs, linen curtains that balloon when the doors open, soft Beni Ourain carpets and cool-grey arabesque tiles underfoot, as well as enormous bathrooms that lead onto private terraces. These residences are a distance away from the Main House, but you’re far from stranded. You can thumb a lift from the frequently roving golf carts, beach-cruiser-style bicycles, or vintage Volkswagen buses.

Not that being late could ever be a big deal here. Even the hotel’s fine-dining stalwart Pimms, now pared back and scrubbed up, doesn’t stand on ceremony. British chef Andrew Gaskin’s menus of three, five and nine courses, featuring scallops and peas in pumpkin oil and lobster bisque with seaweed Johnny cakes, are full of Caribbean flavour but light enough to keep anyone planning to join tomorrow’s sunrise yoga class happy. Next door, occupying a green-tiled, open-air terrace over the surf, is Cip’s, an offshoot of the Cipriani’s Venetian restaurant, serving octopus-and-fennel salad and grilled-lobster pasta. And Maundays Club, which turns out Peruvian tapas, including beef spring rolls and tuna ceviche, backs onto the kind of sanctuary Belmond excels at: the great hotel bar, where guests gather for rum cocktails under a dim, honeyed light. The walls are hung with brass-framed antique mirrors and quirky 1913 sketches by belle-époque artist Georges Goursat that poke fun at high society.

‘Cap J’ never takes itself too seriously. You can sense who the designers are whispering to in its new library, the shelves stacked with jacketless books ranging from a James Thurber biography to Pharrell Williams’s memoir, and scattered with artefacts – a quartz domino set, a small Fauvist painting, a rare coral branch… The message: everyone is interesting, worldly and welcome (for a price). We are the sum of the places we have been. It would seem that LVMH’s recent £2.5 billion deal to purchase Belmond, a match that seems to define the term symbiotic, is a bellwether for an age in which experiences have become our dearest luxuries.

Of course, there are other spots in the Caribbean where you could kick back in a big-name classic: the starchily refined Sandy Lane in Barbados, or rambling Montpelier Plantation on Nevis, beloved by Princess Diana – though Eden Rock, the convalescing 1950s Rockefeller retreat on St Barth’s, won’t reopen until winter 2019, and St John’s low-key legend Caneel Bay remains shuttered. But Cap Juluca’s magnetism is really about that marshmallow-soft sand and the lapping blue water and the stirring of the wind in your ears as you gaze across sleepily at St Martin from Maundays Bay. George and Casa are back, maestros of their crafts in sorbet-coloured uniforms. As you drift off, you can make out the tinny strains of Calypso from Cap Shack, the new beach-barbecue food truck. For now, it’s sweet relief to find yourself back at what feels, simply, like the best hotel on the best beach in the Caribbean.

Belmond Cap Juluca has Deluxe Beachfront Rooms from about £525 per night, including breakfast. belmond.com/capjuluca